wolven7 | Story Excerpt: Half-Moon Dreams

Jarboe - [Bass Force/Angel Jim (Low Rider Mix w/ Jim Thirlwell, Kris Force, Paz Lenchantin & William Faith)]

He finds himself waist-deep in the ditch, only in blood up to his knees. He doesn't contemplate the nature of the rest of the ditch. Too dark. Too warm and cooling too quickly, for the part of himself that he remembers to be entirely comfortable. There is nothing, around him but the runoff ditch and the tunnel, high weeds and grass to either side, and the blood.

The bones are in his hands and at his feet, piled around his legs, and he's standing there, for hours, gnawing at the flesh, scooping up the bloody, filthy water, and drinking in great gulps of it, and he comes to himself, again, and he vomits, for half the amount of time he spent eating. When he's lucid, he remembers what he's done, but he doesn't remember the doing, and he knows that the work he's doing is something awe-full and terrible, in the most arcane senses of those words. He is terrified at what he does, and what he's done, and what he will have to do, but he does it, for himself, and he regrets it the while.

He sees her, at the other end of the tunnel, then, and begins to wade toward her. The bodies are thick, and they catch at his legs, dragging him backward, slowly down, and he builds sandbar after sandbar, ashes and dust giving him a place to stand and rest. (Venetian Snares - [Sinthasomphone]). The water froths and foams as he moves toward her, the work he's doing not yet done, and they want him to stay, to build them a house from themselves, bones for bones, and he has to reach her, or it's all been for nothing. He knows that now, he can smell it and taste it, like the turgid, slightly thickening oily water running down his throat, quenching a thirst he never knew he had.

He thinks of Anne Rice, and vampires and thinks of how like junkies they always seem, jonesing for their next hit. They are never simply life that feeds on life, beings which need to eat, to drink. Always the seductive, repressed sexuality (where is this coming from), and he has to admit, it is a little sexy. He can see her, now, and it's not a tunnel, it's not a cave, and it's not any other womb metaphor. He's walking into himself, and he is holding her, there, garbed in light, and she is weeping, holding such brightness for him, and she is crucified to the sides of his walls.

No angel, no light, she, but the precisely wrong girl and the precisely wrong time, made into something so right to bring him home to himself, and she is trapped. These are not his deeds and his losses, these are her family and friends and he sees their bodies at her feet, and two pairs of horrified, indulgent, loving eyes stare at her, with pick-axe holes, where the backs of their skulls should be, and he knows her, then, and he calls her name as he caresses her cheek and she screams as she bites his hand, taking the first and second fingers into herself, and he knows that this is a dream.

If he were awake, he never would have felt that at all.
©Damien Williams. All Rights Reserved.

Blues Traveler - [Hook]--- Needed to get that one out. For those of you who haven't read my fiction, before... Uhm... Sorry? Not really. Now you know.

Later.